In an interview with Vulture, Lindelof said he thought fanboys on Twitter wouldn’t say they liked Tomorrowland, even if they really did, because they would be seen as sell-outs.

Lindelof quit Twitter in October 2013, when Tomorrowland was in the midst of filming. He says in the interview that George Clooney was supportive during that time, but Clooney was also concerned that Lindelof was putting too much energy into dealing with Twitter hate:

Lindelof: George was there at a pivotal time in terms of my own engagement with social media. We would literally stand there at Video Village as I checked Twitter, and I felt like he was my AA sponsor.

Clooney: I wasn’t trying to convince him to quit..

[Brad] Bird: … He was asking him why. “Why do you feel the need to do this? Because you’re spending energy on it.”

Clooney: It was hurting him.

The conversation also briefly turned to Britt Robertson’s character and why Bird and Lindelof decided to make Tomorrowland‘s protagonist a young woman. They talked about how most films about space travel tend to have male leads, and when they decided to make their hero a woman, everything started falling into place:

Lindelof: It just felt like it was exactly right for us. I also think that if you have a female lead, people suddenly go, “Oh, there has to be a romantic entanglement.” Like, if you’re doing Hunger Games, it’s not enough that you’re dropped into an arena and everyone’s trying to kill you — there has to be not one, but two romantic entanglements! So Brad and I thought, What if she doesn’t get distracted by romantic entanglements? What if her “romance” is with the future?

Clooney: It would be awfully odd in this film for her to stop and say, “Hey there, pal. You have beautiful blue eyes.”

Bird: Thank God you got me to cut that scene. [Laughs.]

Tomorrowland opens today, when fanboys can decide for themselves if the film is an imaginative sci-fi adventure or, as UPROXX’s Vince Mancini put it, a “magical realist disaster.”